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- "Death to pigs"
Actress Sharon Tate was eight months pregnant when she
became the most famous victim of Charles Manson's drug-crazed
followers. At 8.30 a.m. on 9 August 1969 a middle-aged
black woman pounded on the front door of 10090 Cielo Drive
in the hills above Los Angeles' exclusive Bel Air district.
The woman was Winifred Chapman, housekeeper two doors
down at the rented home of film director Roman Polanski
and his pregnant wife, actress Sharon Tate. Mrs Chapman
was screaming hysterically: "Murder, death, bodies,
blood!"
Householder Ray Asin came to the door, and his 15-year-old
son, Jim, made the call to the Los Angeles Police Department
(LAPD), and thus revealed to the world what the state's
prosecutor would later call: "The most bizarre, savage,
nightmarish murder in the recorded annals of crime."
Bodies on the lawn
When the police arrived at 10050 Cielo Drive, a substantial
mansion set in its own grounds, they found a scene of
appalling carnage. In a car parked in the driveway was
the bloody body of a young man slumped over the wheel.
He had been shot four times. On the lawn were the bodies
of a man in his 30s and a young, dark-haired woman in
a nightgown.
The man had been shot twice, struck over the head 13 times
and stabbed a total of 51 times. The woman had 28 stab
wounds. Both were soaked in their own blood. Fearing the
killer might still be around, police entered the house
through a back window. In the living room they found two
more bodies.
A young, blonde woman, dressed only in a flowered bra
and panties, was lying in a foetal position in front of
the fireplace. She was heavily pregnant. She was also
soaked in blood. A white nylon rope had been looped around
her neck, over a rafter and then around the neck of a
man who lay four feet away.
He had a bloody towel over his face and his hands were
still raised, as if protecting his head. He had been stabbed
seven times and shot once. The pregnant woman had a total
of 16 stab wounds, five of which would have been fatal
on their own. On the lower part of the front door the
word PIG had been roughly printed in what tests would
later prove was her blood.
The woman was Sharon Tate. Before they even knew who the
victims were, the police had a suspect. Approaching the
guesthouse on the other side of the swimming pool they
heard a dog barking and a man's voice saying: "Shh,
be quiet." Police burst in and found 19-year-old
William Garretson.
He was the caretaker, hired by owner Rudi Altobelli to
look after the guesthouse, while the main house was let.
Garretson said he'd been there all night, and had heard
nothing suspicious. When police took him on a tour of
the house to show him the mayhem he'd failed to hear,
he was unable to identify any of the bodies.
Dissatisfied with his story, the police placed Garretson
under arrest, but within 24 hours they were forced to
release him after he passed a polygraph test. The LAPD
were left with the bloodiest of jigsaw puzzles. By now
the bodies had been identified. The man in the living
room roped to Sharon Tate was Jay Sebring, 35, an internationally
known hairdresser.
The couple on the lawn were Voytek Frykowski, 32, Polish-born
playboy and friend of Roman Polanski, and Abigail Folger,
25, his girlfriend and heiress to the Folger coffee fortune.
The young man in the car was Steven Earl Parent, 18, a
delivery boy, who'd visited Garretson that night to try
to sell him a clock radio. What was missing was a motive
for their slaughter.
Ritual slaying
The press were screaming "ritual slaying", after
someone got hold of the incorrect idea that the bodies
had been found with hoods over their heads. They also
highlighted the fact that Sharon was found only partially
clothed, and that Sebring was her ex-lover. There were
suggestions of a sex orgy that had ended in death.
But the police were looking for more solid motives. Robbery
seemed unlikely. There were money and valuables lying
around the house in plain view. None of the victims had
been sexually assaulted. But drugs including marijuana,
hashish, cocaine and the hallucinogenic MDA were found,
and autopsy reports later revealed MDA in the systems
of both Folger and Frykowski.
So the police theorised at this early stage either a drug
party "freak-out" in which someone had gone
crazy and killed, or a drug deal gone wrong. They also
entertained the possibility of "deaths by hire".
But there were flaws in all these theories. Outside the
property the phone wires had been carefully cut.
If it was a drug freak-out, this could only have been
done after the murders, which made no sense at all. Also,
how could one person possibly have wreaked so much carnage?
On the other hand the very savagery of the attacks told
against the idea of a professional killing, so the police
were left with a drug burn.
In fact, so convinced were they that this was the result
of an argument over drugs or money or both, that they
totally ignored one lead that could have led them to a
solution to the case within days.
The Los Angeles Sheriffs Office (LASO), working quite
separately from the LAPD, had arrested a hippie musician
called Bobby Beausoleil on 6 August for the murder of
music teacher Gary Hinman. Hinman had been brutally stabbed
to death but, more significantly, the words POLITICAL
PIGGY had been written in blood on the wall in his home.
Beausoleil had been caught driving Hinman's Fiat with
the murder weapon still in the car. The LASO told the
LAPD that their suspect lived with a bunch of other hippies
on Spahn Ranch, an old movie location in the Simi Hills
outside the LA suburb of Chatsworth.
Their leader, whom they seemed to believe was Jesus Christ,
was a man called Charlie. But Sergeant Jess Buckles, assigned
to the Tate killings, wasn't interested. "We know
what's behind these murders," he told LASO detectives.
"They're part of a big dope transaction."
Horrific killings
That same night the LAPD would have another horrendous
double murder on their hands. But even the seemingly glaring
similarities to the Tate killings wouldn't be acknowledged
for three months. At 8.30 p.m. on Sunday 10 August, the
day after the discovery of the five bodies on Cielo Drive,
15-year-old Frank Struthers returned from a boating trip
to his home at 3301 Waverly Drive near Griffith Park.
There appeared to be no-one home, though the blinds were
down and his mother and stepfather, Rosemary and Leno
LaBianca, should have been in. He called his sister, Susan,
and together with her boyfriend, Joe Dorgan, they found
a spare key and entered the house. Leno LaBianca was lying
on his back on the living room floor in his pyjamas with
a bloody pillow-case over his head.
Around his neck was the flex from a heavy lamp, tied tightly
enough to have strangled him. His hands were tied behind
him with a leather thong. He had been stabbed repeatedly
in the abdomen with a knife, and from his stomach an ivory-handled
carving fork still projected. Carved in his flesh was
the word WAR.
When the police arrived they found Rosemary LaBianca in
the bedroom. She was lying in a pool of blood, her short
pink nightgown and a dress she appeared to have put on
over it both bunched above her head. Like her husband
she had a pillowcase over her head and a lamp flex tied
tightly round her neck.
She had been stabbed 41 times in the back and legs. In
the living room high on one wall was written in blood
the words DEATH TO PIGS. On the opposite wall by the front
door was the word RISE. And on the door of the refrigerator
in the kitchen, also in blood, someone had written HEALTER
SKELTER (sic).
But almost immediately police rejected the idea that the
same killers might be behind the Tate and LaBianca murders.
If anything they thought the LaBiancas might be a copycat.
When it was found that Leno, president of a chain of LA
supermarkets, had gambling debts they started to work
on the theory that it could have been a Mafia hit.
And still no-one was interested in connecting either case
to the Hinman killing. That Saturday the police did raid
Spahn Ranch, but they weren't looking for murderers, they
were running down an auto-theft gang, who'd been stealing
VWs and converting them into dune buggies.
The raid was not a success. All 26 suspects had to be
released when it was found that warrants had been misdated.
Among those arrested, and then released, was a 34-year-old
ex-con-man out on parole. His name was Charles Manson.
Broken gun grip
Meanwhile, LAPD's separate investigations into the Tate
and LaBianca murders were making little progress. They
had 25 unidentified fingerprints inside the Tate mansion.
They had three pieces of a broken gun grip also found
at Cielo Drive, and these were identified as belonging
to a Buntline Special Hi-Standard .22 Longhorn revolver.
A description of this quite unusual weapon was circulated
but no information came back. They'd also found a Buck
knife down the back of a chair and a pair of spectacles.
None of these clues had taken them anywhere.
The drug connection was making no progress either. Four
drug dealers who had been frequent visitors to 10050 Cielo
Drive were prime suspects for a while, but were later
eliminated when three proved alibis and another passed
a polygraph. As for the LaBianca detectives, they simply
had no leads at all.
Fear among Hollywood luminaries who had been friends of
Sharon Tate was rife, as they began to think they might
be next on some maniac's list. Frank Sinatra was in hiding.
Mia Farrow was too frightened to attend the funeral. Sales
of guard dogs and guns for personal protection rocketed.
Then on 10 October 1969 police in Independence, a town
5 1/2 hours north of LA, mounted a raid on the Barker
Ranch in the rugged and desolate Panamint Mountains just
south of Death Valley.
They were investigating an arson attack and a series of
car thefts, but local rumour also told stories of orgies,
drug use and a crazed band of hippies called the Manson
Family, who rode round the desert in dune buggies re-enacting
Rommel's battles in North Africa.
The first raid resulted in 10 women and three men being
arrested. Two babies, both with severe sunburn, were also
discovered. Police recovered a number of stolen vehicles
and a store of arms including a sub-machine gun.
Manson arrested
Two days later the police went back and arrested seven
more people. Searching the primitive bathroom at the back,
one officer noticed long, dark hair hanging out of the
top of a tiny cupboard under the wash basin. When challenged,
a man dressed in buckskin came out, cracking a joke about
the cramped space.
He was booked in Independence as "Manson, Charles
M. aka Jesus Christ, God". Among the young girls
picked up in the Barker raid was Kitty Lutesinger, 17,
a girlfriend of Bobby Beausoleil who was already in custody
for the Hinman murder. Kitty was five months pregnant,
frightened and asking for protection.
She told police it was Manson who had sent Beausoleil
along with another of his followers, whom he'd christened
Sadie Mae Glutz. The plan had been to extort money from
Hinman, an ex-member of the Family. But when he'd refused
Bobby had stabbed him. The police had a hard time working
out who was whom after the Barker raid.
All the girls seemed to have a bewildering range of aliases.
But eventually they established that Sadie Mae Glutz was
really Susan Atkins. She was booked and sent to the Sybil
Brand Institute, LA's women's prison. And it was there
that she began to tell her bizarre story to fellow inmates,
who were soon calling her Crazy Sadie.
Sadie bragged of her sexual exploits and first degree
murder charge to anyone who would listen, but most of
all she talked to two ex-prostitutes, Virginia Graham
and Ronnie Howard. She told them how she had in fact stabbed
Hinman while Bobby held him.
But it was her way of telling the tale that astonished
the other women -"just like it was a perfectly natural
thing to do every day of the week," Graham would
later say. But Sadie had other, more shocking stories
to tell.
Soon she was informing her fellow prisoners that she had
done the Tate killings as well, once again on Manson's
instructions. The way Sadie told it, two other girls and
a man had also been involved. Virginia Graham's question
was the same one the police had asked: Why?
Merciless killers
They "wanted to do a crime that would shock the world,"
was Sadie's answer, "that the world would have to
stand up and take notice." But that wasn't all. Charlie
had told them the Family was "chosen" to go
out into the world and release randomly selected people
from the Earth.
Sadie told Graham: "You have to have a real love
in your heart to do this for people." It was she
herself who had stabbed the pregnant Sharon Tate. "It
was just like going into nothing, going into air,"
she told Ronnie Howard. Sharon had begged for mercy, begged
to be allowed to have her baby.
"Look, bitch," Sadie had told her, "I don't
care about you. I don't care if you're going to have a
baby. You're going to die, and I don't feel anything about
it." And the killing itself? "It's like a sexual
release," was Sadie's description. "Especially
when you see the blood spurting out. It's better than
a climax."
Then Sadie started to tell the story of the next night
at the LaBianca house. It was the Family who'd committed
that slaughter, too, this time with Manson himself in
attendance. Normally the cons' code would have prevented
Graham and Howard from snitching, but this was just too
big and too horrible to keep to themselves.
So, after months of fruitless investigations, LAPD detectives
were suddenly handed the whole case on a plate. From conversations
with the other Family girls and a couple of bikers - members
of the Straight Satan gang - whom Manson had tried to
recruit, they were able to piece together the whole story
of the two nights when Manson had tried to start what
he called "Helter Skelter".
Manson had preached to his Family for two years that a
civil war was imminent in America between blacks and whites.
It was this war that he called Helter Skelter. While Helter
Skelter was in progress, the Family would hide in an underground
world to which there was an entrance in Death Valley.
The blacks would be victorious, but when they found themselves
unable to run the country, they would invite Manson and
the Family to take over.
Selecting the victims
On the afternoon of Friday 8 August, Manson told a group
of selected followers: "Now is the time for Helter
Skelter." The war was taking too long to happen.
It was up to him to get it started. The venue Manson had
chosen was a house where record producer Terry Melcher
had lived.
Manson, who fancied himself as a singer and guitarist,
had nursed hopes that Melcher would give him a record
deal, but the main reasons for selecting the house seem
to have been because it was isolated and because both
Manson and his right-hand man Charles Tex' Watson, 23,
knew the layout of the place, having been there to parties
on a number of occasions.
That evening Manson gave a knife and his favourite .22
revolver to Tex, and told him to go and kill everybody
in the house "as gruesome as [he] could". To
help him Manson selected Sadie (Susan Atkins) and Katie
(Patricia Krenwinkel), two of his hard-core followers,
both just 21 years old, and Linda Kasabian, 20, a newcomer,
who was the only one of the Family with a valid driver's
licence.
He told them all to put on dark clothes and carry knives.
"Go with Tex," he told the girls, "and
do whatever he tells you to do." Apparently they
assumed they were going on one of their regular "creepy
crawling" missions, during which they broke into
houses at night and moved things around while the occupants
slept.
But as the group were about to drive away in one of the
Spahn Ranch hand's '59 Ford, Manson leaned into the car
and added: "Leave a sign. You girls know what to
write. Something witchy." It is a measure of the
extraordinary power Manson held over the Family that none
of them thought to question him further.
They drove into Benedict Canyon and parked outside 10050
Cielo Drive. Tex climbed a telegraph pole outside the
house and cut the phone wires. Then they left the car
at the bottom of the hill and returned on foot.
The four dark-clad figures scaled the fence, and immediately
saw the headlights of Steve Parent's Rambler coming down
the drive. Tex told the girls to drop flat. Then he went
over, called out "Halt!" and shot the driver
four times.
"I am the devil"
Up at the house Tex slit a screen on one of the windows
and climbed in. He opened the front door and let Sadie
and Katie in, too. Linda stayed outside. In the living
room they found a man asleep on the couch. This was Voytek
Frykowski. The man stretched sleepily, and asked: "What
time is it?" Then he saw the gun Tex was holding
in his face.
"Who are you? What are you doing here?" said
Frykowski, alarmed now. "I am the devil," was
Tex's reply, "and I've come to do the devil's business."
Then he ordered Sadie to tie the man up. The girls found
the other three occupants of the house and brought them
at knife-point into the living room.
All were too shocked to offer any resistance. Tex ordered
them to lie face down on the floor. Jay Sebring complained,
pointing out Sharon Tate's condition. "Can't you
see she's pregnant. Let her sit down." Tex shot him.
Then they took the rope Tex had brought, and strung Sharon
and Abigail Folger up to an overhead beam by their necks.
"What are you going to do with us?" the women
demanded. "You are all going to die," said Tex.
Frykowski managed to get free from his bonds, and a mad
struggle ensued. Sadie stabbed repeatedly at the man as
they fought. Then Frykowski ran for the front door. Tex
shot him once, then beat him over the head repeatedly
with the butt of the gun.
Standing outside, Linda saw Tex pursue Frykowski out of
the front door, and stab him many times on the lawn. Almost
simultaneously Abigail Folger, who had also managed to
get free, ran out of the french windows in Sharon's bedroom.
She was bleeding profusely. Katie was after her with knife
upraised.
She caught up with Abigail on the lawn, and stabbed her
until she lay still. In Sadie Mae Glutz's chilling words:
"Sharon was the last to die." The young actress
pleaded for her life: "Please don't kill me. I want
to have my baby." But the killers were without mercy.
In the version she told the jury, Sadie claimed that she
held Sharon while Tex stabbed her.
But to her prison mates she said that she herself had
stabbed the pregnant woman, and then tasted the blood.
"Wow, what a trip!" she told Virginia Graham
in the Sybil Brand Institute. "To taste death and
yet give life. . . It's warm and sticky and nice."
Outside Sadie found Tex checking that Abigail and Frykowski
were dead.
He told Sadie to go back inside and write "something
that will shock the world". Back in the living-room
Sadie found the pregnant Sharon still bleeding. "I
knew there was a living being inside of that body, and
I wanted to but I didn't have the courage to go ahead
and take it," she testified later.
Instead Sadie took a towel, dipped it in Sharon Tate's
blood, and wrote PIG on the door. Then they left. Linda
drove while the others changed out of their blood-soaked
clothing. Tex was angry because Sadie had lost her knife.
(It was this that the police found down the back of a
chair.)
The girls complained that their heads hurt from having
their hair pulled in the struggle. Katie said her hand
was bruised because she kept hitting bone when she stabbed.
The bloody clothes were thrown down a hill from Benedict
Canyon Road (where police had failed, a TV crew found
the bundle four months later).
The weapons were similarly disposed of. They stopped on
a side street to use a garden hose to wash off any remaining
blood. A man came out and tried to stop them, but they
got away from him. Later Rudolf Weber would come forward
to say it was he who had seen the killers that night.
Amazingly he even remembered the licence plate of the
'59 Ford Mercury - GYY 435.
Then they drove back to Spahn Ranch to find Manson waiting
where they'd left him. "What are you doing home so
early?" he asked. They told him what they'd done.
"Boy," said Tex, "it sure was helter skelter."
The next evening the Family watched the TV news about
the murders they'd committed.
Afterwards Manson told them they were going out again,
only this time he was coming with them. "Last night
was too messy," he told them. "This time I'm
going to show you how to do it."
"I Have tied them up"
Once again they took the '59 Ford. This time 17-year-old
Clem (Steve Grogan) and 20-year-old Lulu (Leslie van Houten)
came top. They drove around looking for a suitable house
at random. They stopped in Pasadena, and Manson got out
to take a look. A few minutes later he was back.
"He said he "saw pictures of children through
the window," Sadie said later, "and he didn't
want to do that house. " Finally they pulled up outside
a house where members of the Family, including Manson,
had been to an acid party a year before. Manson told them
to wait. He took a gun and went towards the house next
door.
"I have the people tied up," he told the waiting
group when he returned some time later. "They are
very calm." Manson had used the leather thong he
habitually wore around his neck to tie Leno LaBianca's
hands. Clearly Manson had told the LaBiancas they would
not be harmed if they co-operated. It had been a cruel
lie.
Now he told Tex, Katie and Lulu to go into the house,
and "paint a picture more gruesome than anybody has
ever seen". Then he drove away with the others, telling
Tex, Katie and Lulu to hitch back to Spahn when they'd
finished their horrific night's work. Inside Katie and
Lulu took Rosemary LaBianca into the bedroom.
When they heard Tex stabbing Leno in the other room, Rosemary
started to scream: "What are you doing to my husband?"
Lulu then held her down, while Katie stabbed her. The
dying woman's last words were still: "What are you
doing to my husband?" Returning to the living-room,
Katie took a carving fork from a drawer, stabbed Leno
LaBianca with it several times, then stuck it into his
stomach and watched, fascinated, as it waved back and
forth.
Then she carved the word WAR into his flesh. When they'd
written in blood on the walls and the fridge, they all
took a shower, calmly ate water-melon and drank chocolate
milk in the kitchen, then left.
Such was the story that state prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi
had to tell the jury, when the trial of Charles Manson
and his followers opened in LA's Hall of Justice on 24
July 1970. Denied access to the court, other female members
of the Family kept a vigil for their Messiah on the pavement
outside, while Manson did his best to disrupt proceedings
inside.
The court refused him permission to conduct his own defence,
so he appointed Irving Kanarek, notoriously the most obstructive
and long-winded attorney in California. At times Manson
refused to face the judge and was removed from court.
The night before he faced the jury for the first time,
he carved a bloody swastika into his forehead, declaring:
"I have X'd myself from your world."
Slavish followers
Whatever he did, the three girls on trial, Sadie, Katie
and Lulu, imitated his every action, thereby proving the
prosecution's contention that they were wholly under the
influence of the man they believed was Christ, and that
though he hadn't struck a blow himself, it was Charles
Manson who was chiefly responsible for the Tate and LaBianca
murders.
Initially it was to have been Sadie who would testify
to how they tried to ignite the war between black and
white - Helter Skelter. She had agreed to turn State's
evidence in exchange for exemption from the death penalty.
But even from prison, using the other girls as go-betweens,
Manson was able to reach out and draw her back into the
fold. So finally it was Linda Kasabian, who had only driven
the car, who became the prosecution's star witness in
exchange for full immunity.
Without such a deal there is no way the DA's office could
have got a conviction at all. They had several pieces
of evidence including an alleged remark of Manson's to
a member of the Straight Satans that: "We knocked
off five of them just the other night." They had
Tex and Katie's fingerprints inside the Tate mansion.
By now they also had a gun, and a witness who remembered
a number plate. As far as corroborative evidence was concerned,
that was about it. But with Linda's testimony they had
enough to get convictions and death sentences for all
four defendants, though the sentences were later commuted
to life after the gas 'chamber was banned in California.
"Watch your own kids"
Facing the court with newly shaved heads, the girls spat
defiance. "Better lock your doors and watch your
own kids," Sadie told the jury who had just voted
for her death. Manson himself who, according to one of
his disciples, was "a changeling (who) seemed to
change every time I saw him," had yet another face
for the occasion.
His hands trembled and he seemed close to tears. "I
accept this court as my father," he said meekly.
"I have always done my best in my life to uphold
the laws of my father, and I accept my father's judgement."
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